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Month: December 2013

About ten years ago I was visiting an older friend in a Southwest desert town. While we were eating at his favorite local Mexican restaurant, he mentioned that he was never hungry. At the time I thought that was an odd statement because he was eating his professed favorite dish right there in front of me. He was thin but had been a farmer all his life and at 75 years old was obviously keeping himself sufficiently nourished to remain upright and physically active. When asked to clarify, all he could do was reiterate that he never really felt hungry. At the time I could not fathom how that could be so.

The Signs

Recently, I’ve been thinking about what hunger actually is. The idea is expressed in a number of contexts so let me give some examples:

“I feel hungry for a pizza.”

“My blood sugar is low. I need to eat.”

“After working all day, I am starved.”

“It’s 6 pm. What shall we have for dinner?”

The explanations for the above statements might be:

The word ‘hungry’ is a synonym for a particular food desire. Pizza is a food choice not necessarily what the body needs for nourishment.

Someone may feel weak, lethargic or emotionally uneasy for a complex number of reasons. This may or may not be due to low blood sugar but often eating helps to alleviate the symptoms of discomfort.

If one does significant exercise or simply endures for a number of hours without eating, one may find they have a strong appetite.

A clock does not control your desire for food. Your mind is trying to force compliance to a contrived idea. The body’s need for food is real. What is considered food and when to eat it is another question.

Counting Calories

Food has calories. Or, does it?

A calorie is a measurement of heat. This was useful during the era of steam engines as applied to the heat released from coal and oil. This does not apply to the world of biology or modern physics. Food is not burned in the living body. The biologic idea of a calorie does not have any relevant truth in it even though it is repeatedly printed on food labels and diet/nutrition books as though it does. Calories in (food), calories out (energy expended) is a false statement. Do you think that the calorie equivalent 4 ounce piece of cooked Chinook salmon verses a 2.13 oz. 3-Musketeers candy bar is going to have the same energizing effect for the body in the short term or in the long term? You might consider this example unfair because the candy bar is 67% pure sugar and the salmon has no sugar. Half the salmon’s calories are from fat. A portion of that fat is an omega-3 fat known as DHA and is not broken down for energy because it is so precious to the human body it is conserved and appropriated into brain and nerve tissue.

Confused? It seems like the food peddlers are fine with twisting facts. Selling low nutrient synthetic food as though it was real food is a profitable game.

Unfortunately, food is complicated. Why our bodies need food is even more complicated. How a diet of specific foods ultimately affect our body is not well understood. But let’s not get overwhelmed by a tsunami of ignorance and start from the beginning.

I wrote last time (Dehydration article) that the cells of the body extract electrons from the food we eat. Notice that calories are not part of that picture. Food does not burn like wood in a fire. Electrons through a complex process in each cell’s mitochondria (tiny cells or organelles within each cell) are used to produce ATP. ATP pumps the proteins, DNA, etc. in the cell with energy to allow them to open their physical structure like an umbella so that water can form a multi-layered coating. These physically structured layers of water form a liquid crystalline semiconductor (not unlike silicon electronic semiconductors) that is part of a body-wide network that connects all tissue and cells. The energizing of this system from various sources is the big picture of energy in the body.

Charge!

The electrons in food are like the electrons in a battery charger. The molecules of ATP are like charged batteries. They move from the mitochondria out into the rest of the cell to discharge their energy where it is needed. In the process of discharging, ATP lets go of a phosphate group and becomes ADP (adenosine di-phosphate instead of tri-phosphate). The exact details do not matter but the concept I would like to impress is that ATP is recycled up to 10,000 times per day by the heart and many hundreds of times in the average cell. How much ATP you have in your body and how fast you can recycle it is going to affect how much energy you feel you have. If you have less ATP you need to eat more often to provide more electrons. There is a temporary storage of electrons in the form of glycogen (sometimes called animal starch) in the liver as well as in the form of fat in adipose tissue found throughout the body. People’s ability to use glycogen and fat is a critical source of energy but varies greatly.

How much energy you have in the moment does necessarily depend on what you ate last and/or exactly how many micro-nutrients (vitamins, minerals, etc.) were consumed. Of course, long term this does matter. Just look at the effects of typical poor-quality restaurant food and processed supermarket food is having on modern populations. What does matter short term (i.e. during the day) is the body’s ability to maintain the efficient flow of electrons to regenerate ATP.

How does it make sense if you feel hungry two hours after eating a meal or even after 4 or 5 hours? Real hunger is due to a perceived lack of functional energy. All of us have plenty of body fat to survive nicely without food for much more than a few hours. Even if you have no glycogen stored in the liver (not likely), the body can obtain a day’s worth of energy from less than a pound of fat. This means that, short of starvation, true physiological hunger could be considered a dysfunction of the body. On a daily basis most of us more than adequately keep up with our energy needs from food.

The two main sources of electrons from food are carbohydrates and fats. The other macro-nutrient protein is metabolically and economically problematic at being the major source of food electrons. Protein does supply amino acids that are necessary for building or rebuilding our tissues and enzymes. Excess or damaged amino acids eventually have their nitrogen stripped away by the liver and they are broken down for their electrons similarly as carbohydrates.

There has been a big debate as to whether carbohydrates (i.e. sugars and starches) or fats or some magic combination of them should supply us with the food energy we need. For the moment, forget about whether there is a need for specific essential carbohydrates (there is none) or essential fats (there are several). Forget about the necessity of oil-soluble vitamins such as A, D, E & K and other micro-nutrients only found in fats. Let’s just consider how the body assimilates and utilizes carbs and fats.

Fat vs. Carbs

The manner in which these two nutrients get manipulated at the cellular level is quite different. Both ways eventually create ATP for the cell’s use. Fat produces more calories per gram – 9 verses 4 for carbs. That is a little bit over twice as much per given weight. But we are not burning food. We are turning it into energized ATP. Carbs, specifically glucose, produce about 36 ATP/mole. Fat, specifically the common fatty acid palmitic acid, produces about 147 ATP/mole. (In chemistry, a mole is a specific number of actual molecules). That is a four-fold difference per molecule and a three-fold difference figured on a gram for gram basis.

If you were inclined to think that you could just eat more carbs to get the same energy as fat there is a functional as well as a qualitative difference to consider. You have probably watched documentaries about explorers or scientists who try to survive at the frigid poles of the earth. Their food cravings are not normal. It is universally spoken that there is a desire for fats – sometimes in the size and shape of a stick of butter! Why? The need for calories (actually electrons) is so great that significant amounts of dietary fat are the body’s preferred energy source. The cold temperature also shifts the cellular biochemistry and metabolism towards the processing of fat. Eating more carbs is not what the body wants in those circumstances. Extracting electrons from carbs is not efficient compared to fats. The biochemistry and biophysics of this situation is not simple to explain but when it’s cold, fat is what the body craves.

So if we are not in Antarctica, why would fats be good for us? In a word: efficiency. A lack of efficiency means waste and tissue wear-and-tear. Most adults have various levels of mitochondrial dysfunction. Most children, on the other hand, are energy machines. Carbs that are being processed in the adult mitochondria tend to create high amounts of reactive oxygen species (ROS) which causes oxidative damage to the very complex molecular machinery. The body can produce anti-oxidant compounds such as glutathione and super oxide dismutase but again that ability is limited in a typical older person. Anti-oxidants found in food have limited value in this situation. Without sufficient protection, mitochondrial function gets further chipped away over time.

The less efficient the mitochondria are the less energy you have. There is no way around it. The less energy you have the less able you are to maintain your body over time. Sure you can conserve your energy by behavior modification but that is just buying some time. Except by a fatal accident, death is a usually a slow process of metabolic failure until a final catastrophic failure (e.g. heart attack, stroke, organ failure, cancer, etc.) totally disables one or more critical body functions.

The curious part is that eating a rational fat-dominant diet actually normalizes the body’s fat stores. As the author Covert Bailey characterized – “become a better butter-burner” – means that you increase the body’s ability to use fat for energy both from the diet and from your own adipose tissue. This is a huge advantage. Instead of frequently stoking your ‘fire’ with kindling (i.e. carbs), you can enjoy the more constant ‘heat’ from a long-burning log (i.e. fat).

One of the biggest bugaboos that people have regarding the consuming of fat is the 50+ year old fear of cholesterol. That mind-virus will be a topic in the future.

The body has key requirements that must be fulfilled for health to be present. If these are not fully operating then the adult body begins to fail or, in the case of children, their bodies never develop properly. Over time the body becomes less healthy and less functional until there is a catastrophic failure and death. We know that we are going to die so that should not come as a surprise but why health declines and disease manifests is not well understood by most people or the medical mainstream. Cellular dehydration is part of the collage of why the body succumbs.

Water in the Body

Water is so ubiquitous that its importance is largely ignored in medicine as well as most sciences. In physiology, the body’s water volume is the measure of how much water is in the body.

Arthur Guyton ‘s Textbook of Medical Physiology states that “the total amount of water in a man of average weight (70 kilograms) is approximately 40 litres, averaging 57 percent of his total body weight. In a newborn infant, this may be as high as 75 percent of the body weight, but it progressively decreases from birth to old age, most of the decrease occurring during the first 10 years of life. Also, obesity decreases the percentage of water in the body, sometimes to as low as 45 percent”.

It can be inferred that as the body ages or becomes sick the percentage of water becomes less not more. Further it is known that two-thirds of the water in the body is inside the cells (intracellular). This is approximately 25 liters on average in the above example.

The one-third of the water that is outside of the cells (extracellular) is easy to adjust. For example, if the blood pressure is low due to trauma, disease or blood loss then a saline solution (approximately 1%) is often administered via IV to restore normal blood volume and, hopefully, good flow and pressure. A less rapid adjustment can be made by drinking mildly salty water (1 teaspoon/qt.) or salted soup or other liquid. Extracellular dehydration has to be addressed somehow with both water and salt (sodium chloride).

The degree of hydration of the interior of the body’s cells is much harder to determine and to remedy if it is low. Cells cannot be forced to accept water merely by drinking water. The cells are not passive sponges. They have active structural, chemical and energetic systems that manage the placement of water in the cell for proper function. If the cell has been traumatized or abused in any way (think typical lifestyle and environmental actions) then its internal systems will not be functioning properly. Water will be lost from the cell because the mechanisms to keep water in place are not working properly. If water is lost from the cell then potassium is also dissipated and lost. We call this cellular inflammation because disorder or entropy has increased often times showing up as some degree of swelling.

An extrapolated status of cellular water in the body can be indicated by the BUN/creatinine ratio on a standard blood chemistry test. It should be around 10± and not over 20. The kidneys filter the blood and control water balance with a two step process. First, they filter the plasma which is the water and soluble component of blood. The second stage then returns to the blood what the body needs to be conserved. What does not go back into the blood becomes urine. If the kidneys are trying to conserve the body’s water then it is going to have a tough time getting rid of water soluble urea (Blood Urea Nitrogen) and possibly other wastes. Urea is constantly generated by the liver from ongoing protein breakdown. If water is abundant in the body then urea can be excreted easily. If the level of waste products is normalized, water has the possibility of entering the cells if needed.

Beyond the function of the kidneys, why does cellular dehydration happen? First let’s understand the basics about water.

What is water?

The idea that water is a simple fluid is mistaken. This simplistic notion is often framed in a way that construes water in the cell as merely a convenient medium to suspend and move around important molecules and perhaps to keep the cell lipid membrane from collapsing. Water is actually an active, not passive, partner in the cell’s biochemical and energetic processes. There are literally only a few molecules of water between adjacent proteins and structures inside the cell. If the molecules of water were animated individually as single molecules bouncing around inside the cell then very little biochemistry could be accomplished in such chaos and life would not exist.

Fortunately, life exists because water is not what standard chemistry and biology teaches – simply as H2O. Through the work of scientists like Gilbert Ling [gilbertling.org], Gerald Pollack [Cells, Gels and the Engines of Life, Fourth Phase of Water], Mae-Wan Ho [Institute of Science in Society] and others, water has been shown that it can be assembled into large structured arrays especially inside living tissue. This means that the individual molecules of water do not always exist as we have been taught. Rather the hydrogen and oxygen atoms can arrange themselves into a multi-layered hexagonal (six-sided) network similar to layers of chicken wire. Instead of the ratio of hydrogen to oxygen being 2:1 as with normal bulk water, the ratio is approximately 3:2. In this case, oxygen (larger yellow circles in diagram) is at the intersection points and hydrogen (small green circles) reside in between them. This new configuration of water leaves it with an overall negative charge unlike neutral bulk water. Layers of hexagonal water sheets will bond with one another simply by being slightly offset from the adjacent layer. It has been shown that as many as millions of layers can be stacked on one another under certain laboratory conditions. This structured water is significantly denser and has unique properties, electrical and otherwise. Solid ice is similar to structured liquid water but it has a different bonding configuration between the hexagonal sheets and has no electrical charge.

Consider that a gelatin dessert contains about 95% water yet the water it contains is not liquid even at room temperature. The water has formed layers along the charged collagen proteins and so becomes structured.

Of course, there are many other details about the structuring of water and its properties but the takeaway concept is that water in living cells is actually a semi-solid liquid crystal with unique physical properties.

Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP)

A quick trip back to high school biology – it was taught that the formation of ATP by the hundreds of mitochondria located inside each cell is the source of mobile energy units used by the cell. ATP is formed by a complex biochemical system within the mitochondria that extracts electrons from the food we eat. Three phosphate ions are serially joined to a molecule of adenosine to form adenosine tri-phosphate. A large amount of energy is released to the cell when one phosphate group is removed from ATP to form ADP (adenosine di-phosphate). The amazing nano-machinery in mitochondria daily churns out an amount of ATP that equals the weight of the entire body! ATP is used and recycled continuously about 10,000 times per day. Anything that slows or disrupts the production of ATP results in a disruption of the body and it functioning. This is fundamental to the aging process.

Gilbert Ling has shown that ATP is used by the cell to unfold proteins so that potassium and water can bond to the numerous charged sites along its chains of amino acids. Water becomes structured as it forms a multi-layered reverse micelle which is simply a water-coated protein or other suitable organic molecule. So ATP is not the ultimate source of energy for the cell. The ATP is used to open the branches of proteins for potassium and water adhesion. Of course, this is contrary to standard biology which is largely based on outdated data and theories that do not acknowledge the principles of modern physics such as quantum electrodynamics [QED].

The ultimate source of energy for the cell is from the quantum effects of liquid water crystals that collect and conduct the energy of electrons and photons (think light hitting the eyes and skin). There are many more details to how exactly this happens but the point is that the binding of water to cellular proteins, DNA and the collagen connective tissue networks of the body is how the body is powered and how it can move energy instantly from one point to another.

Playing Nice with Water

Water requires energy to structure itself so that it can function as part of the body’s energy system. As I have stated, ATP fulfills that step as well as natural electro-magnetic waves (EMFs). This means that the body’s ability to produce large amounts of ATP can be a serious limiting factor for health. Any hiccup or lacking is a serious problem. Many things can limit the mitochondrial function. A wide variety of stress responses from many sources can, especially over the long term, cause a decline in ATP production due to dysfunctional mitochondria. It is not just about what you put in your mouth such as nutrients or anti-nutrients (toxins) as some people think. Defective mitochondria are a major producer of oxidants that damage mitochondrial DNA and enzymes and deplete native anti-oxidants such as glutathione.

Water does align to a magnetic field. For water molecules to slow down their random motion enough to self-assemble along the charged sites of organic molecules there needs to be a relatively static magnetic field for them to orient to. The earth’s magnetic field of about 0.5 gauss normally provides that stabilizing force. Magnetism arises at a right angle from the flow of an electric current such as the massive currents in the earth’s core.

In our modern lives, we are surrounded by 60 cycle electric power around the clock from wiring in buildings and along power line poles and high tension towers. The health dangers of electric power were first brought to light by Dr. Robert O Becker and others during the 80’s. Becker was an orthopedic surgeon and had done unique research to uncover the natural electric currents in bone and other body structures. Sufficient exposure to even very weak fluxing magnetic fields from oscillating electric currents caused demonstrable dysfunction to cells and body systems.

Now for the last two decades we have flooded our environment with microwave radiation and its accompanying magnetic field that comes from personal cell phone use and the commercial infrastructure that makes it possible. Wireless computers and other electronic devices are ubiquitous in our homes, businesses and institutions. They use the same band of frequencies as cell phones and your microwave oven (2.4-2.5 gigahertz).

Industry, academic and government experts say that the levels of electro-magnetic fields (EMFs) are too low to cause thermal effects (i.e. heating). Of course, this is true but the non-thermal effects on cell biology and the health of living organisms is very real. There is academic research that shows the negative effects that the official experts don’t want to acknowledge. Even children have done simple experiments with plants showing the obvious negative effects of cell phones and wireless routers.

The situation is very similar to the long ordeal with the tobacco companies a few decades ago. This time there is much more at stake from a business perspective. Telecom and computer technology is pervasive and people are hooked on it. The rotating doors of government and business allow an authoritative subculture to grow that finds very little is wrong with adverse health effects as long as they can be denied or at least vigorously questioned. The precautionary principle is often framed as being anti-business and denies the advantages of a useful technology! As with tobacco and some pharmaceutical drugs, the death toll can get very steep before a restrictive action is officially advocated. Health effects that don’t involve death are largely ignored and simply become part of the noise of low level chronic dysfunction. The growing epidemic of numerous diseases is directly correlative with our increased exposure to electrical power fields and electronic signals. This does not prove anything by itself. Disease is multi-fold but a big piece of the EMF-health picture can be found in the biological and medical research albeit with some effort.

Another axe to functional water in the body is the fluoride content of potable water. 90% of cities in the US are fluoridated vs. the reverse situation in Europe. There is no legitimate science or policy that justifies fluoridation of drinking water. It is easy to find many sources of information about the various issues around fluoride. The point I would like to make is that fluoride does not benefit the body in the high amounts recommended and made allowable by government. Yes, 1-2 parts per million is way too much according to much evidence showing fluorosis. Fluoride is a very efficient toxin that can penetrate throughout the body. Besides water treatment, it is used in the formulation of a number of common prescription drugs. The low level ingestion of fluoride has been found to severely block the electron loading of the cellular water matrix talked about above. High levels are used as rat poison and in saran gas, a poison gas used in chemical warfare.

Water is Life

In summary, water is an important key for life. About ninety-nine percent of our body’s molecules (not weight) are water. Some creatures like jellyfish are literally almost pure water yet life in them exists because energy is transduced in and through the coherent semi-crystalline water networks that link all parts of the body. We may think that food gives us energy but without water nothing would work. Plants use water and the photons in sunlight to derive useful energy for growth and function. We are not plants with leaves and roots (a direct connection to the electron-rich earth) so we need a boost from some photonic energy in the form of electron-rich foods. Our biochemical battery ATP is the switch that turns the real power on. Modern physics has connected many dots regarding subatomic elements and how they interact. Perhaps other sciences will grasp how the study of energy dynamics [remember E=MC2] may shed light in other areas.

Medical knowledge is a combination of clinical experience with a foundation in academic education. Often this academic knowledge is biased and/or incomplete. Coupled with dogmatic or egoistic thinking, functional biologic/medical knowledge suffers. When a field like medicine chooses not to incorporate all realms of science and be goaded by business interests, it will not solve difficult medical problems such as cancer or brain diseases. Witness the current state of medicine. It cannot prove its worthiness unless it acknowledges its blind spots and revises its current paradigms. Only then can clinical practice be allowed to align to a more complete view. Understanding cellular dehydration is one of those critical issues.

Definitons of the Field

1. A tract of land that grows annual crops or perennial grasses and forbs.
2. A branch of science.
3. The space around a radiating body within which its electromagnetic oscillations can exert force on another similar body not in contact with it.
4. A dynamic environmental tableau containing all physical and energetic properties, objects, etc.
5. The cellular terroir.